Okay, even tho I chose that title, I'm not sure if there'll be a Java -> Rails II but I'm going to be positive. Things are going good so far.

Here's my initial assesment. After doing some cumbersome setup (zero compared to the J2EE world) I was able to quickly put up a few pages relating to domain entities. The magic in this is the scaffolding capability. It uses a pattern that naturally falls out of web development; a full-list, detail-view, edit, delete type capability. There must be some fancy name for that I'm sure.

It took me a bit to re-learn all the mysql stuff you have to do for creating a new user, password, database, etc. I wish they wouldn't use the 'root' user name to mean their DB admin. Oh well.

As I'm doing Rails of course I'm learning Ruby. It's a little strange and cumbersome right now but I'll give it a chance. I wonder if Python is the same way for people just picking it up. I really think it isn't. I remember working with Python and so often it just works the way you think it should. Perhaps my memory timeline is off and those were memories after using Python for a year or so.

Incidentally I'm reading 2 books while going thru this process. "Programming Ruby" by Thomas & Hunt and "Agile Web Development with Rails" by Thomas and Heinemeier. The books seem good enough.